Watch the most popular hashtags change from day to day here

If you hang around here for long enough, you will see the hashtags change over time. As time goes by, certain Ukranian city names appear and this actually gives us a rather precise timeline of the Russian invasions in the different areas of Ukraine.


Looking at the bar chart from day to day, we see a general persistent trend in hashtags such as Ukraine and Russia. Furthermore many hashtags expressing sympathy with Ukraine is trending throughout the period. Examples of these are "StandWithUkraine" and "StopRussia".


One of the interesting things we find when studying the development in hashtag-trends is that different Ukranian city names are trending around the same day as their were attacked by Russia. This means that the bar chart provides us with a rather precise timeline of the attacks of Ukrainian cities. On the 24/02/2022 we see that "Kyiv" is trending which corresponds to the day that Russia initiated attacks on the Kyiv Oblast (www.edition.cnn.com). The same applies on 02/03/2022 where Kharkiv was trending and the Russian army captured Kharkiv (www.nytimes.com), Mariupol on 10/03/2022, where the city was bombed (www.theguardian.com) and lastly "Bucha" and "Buchamassacre" on 04/04/2022 and the following days. Bucha was visited on 04/04 by Ukranian president Zelensky after the killings, rapings and torturement of many Ukranian civilians.


All in all it seems that the majority, if not all, of the top trending hashtags on Twitter regarding the war expresses sympathy with Ukraine in this time of war. It is therefore probable that the majority of Twitter users sympathises with Ukraine. Still it cannot be excluded that some nations may use other social media platforms than Twitter and therefore we cannot conclude that the majority of social media users in general supports Ukraine.

The most relevant words depends on the period in time

Take a look at the wordclouds filtered on time in this section to see the most relevant words regarding the war in the given time period on Twitter. The wordclouds are generated based on TF-IDF scores in order to highlight, not simply the most frequent used words, but the most relevant words for the specific period of time.

Explore the prominent words yourself or take a look at our analysis below.

Looking at the wordclouds based on highest TF-IDF scores for different time periods, we hoped to see a change of discourse and/or subject as time proceeded. Looking at the first period of the war from the Russian Invasion of Ukraine until March 10th, we see that some of the most prominent words are "williamson", "edinburgh" and "absolutist". The first refer to Hugh Williamson, the Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, who in the first days of the war expressed deep concerns towards Russia's act of war crimes. The term "edinburgh" may be rated as relevant, as Ukranians joined in huge demonstrations in Scotland against the attacks on their homelands during the first days of the war. "absolutist" can refer to different specific cases as well as the meaning of the term in general. One case which was trending on March 7th was when Elon Musk refused to block Russian news sources on Starlink which resulted in many people accusing him of being a "free speech absolutist".

Turning our attention towards the second wordcloud for the period from March 11th until March 29th, the most highlighted words include "birzamanlar", "ibrahimcelikkol", "zulhak", "nftcommunity", "russianassettracker" (probably a hashtag) and "schwarzenegger". When investigating these words, we found that some words seemed more related to the war than others. For example "birzamanlar" and "ibrahimcelikkol" is a Turkish expression and actor, respectively, which do not have any obvious connection to the war. On the other hand the expression "russian-asset-tracker" is the name of a global investigation into assets held outside Russia linked to individuals sanctioned for supporting the government of Russia, and this investigation was kicked off on April 8th 2022. Furthermore Arnold "Schwarznegger" held a speech on March 18th, where he publicly asked Putin to stop the war.

In the last wordcloud for March 30th to April 15th, it is very prominent that the focus of many tweets regarding the war is the rapid increase in war crimes performed by Russia. Words like "burcha-massacre", "rape" and "acid" is in focus which most likely refers to killings and rapes in Bucha during the weeks of April and the public suspense of whether Russia has introduced chemical weapons in Ukraine.

See the shift in usage of words from the first two weeks of the war until now

The word shift plot to the right displays the shift in use of words from the first two weeks of the war vs. the first two weeks of April. Hold your mouse on top of the bars to the right to see the exact values of word shifts!


To clarify what can be seen in the plot, the light colors represent the words that have been less frequently used in the last two weeks than in the first two weeks and the dark colors respresent words that are more frequently used in the last two weeks than in the first two weeks. Yellow indicates positive words, while blue indicates negative words.


As can be seen by the light blue color, the words 'crimes', 'rape' and 'raped' was more frequently used in the first two weeks. However, the words 'stop', 'refugees', 'nuclear' and 'hospital' are more frequently used now. This might be because there is a larger amount of refugees now than there was in the first two weeks of the war and the topic of nuclear war and nuclear explosions are more prevalent now ever since the attack near Chernobyl. The word 'plant' is more frequently used now, but it is not easy to determine if this is referring to crops or nuclear power plants without more context.


There is a slightly higher overall sentiment in these previous two weeks of data than in the first two weeks. However, this difference is very slight - only 0.01 shift in sentiment score.

Change in usage of words from the beginning of the war until now



There are a few interesting tendencies to be seen in the dispersion plot above. First of all, the use of the Ukranian city name "Vasylkiv" peaks around the 25th-28th February 2022, then again around 12th March 2022 and lastly in the period of 1st-4th April 2022. These periods corresponds to the dates of the initial and second attack on the city and the declaration of liberation from Russian invaders, respectively (www.theguardian.com).


Furthermore the word "glory" was used mostly by the Russians around February 28th 2022, which was a few days after the first attacks in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is a ukranian war-saying "Slava Ukraina" which mean "Glory to Ukraine", so the russian tweets about glory could possibly indicate a pro-ukranian tweet.


The word "economy" was used significantly more by the Russians than the other languages on March 8th 2022 which is approximately a week after the West started to impose economical sanctions on Russia(ns). It can also be seen that the expression "nuclear war" seemed to be used more by the Russians around April 1st. We did not find any particular big events regarding this on the exact date but the debate of whether a nuclear war was a significant threat did rise during April 2022